Friday morning, the morning of July 26th, we packed up our stuff and Diego drove us to the train station so we could head into the center of town and find our pre-booked hostel. The room was supposed to be just $25 USD per night, and wow did we find out why! The hostel, called Kilka Backpackers, was one of the worst places we stayed in yet – and we made sure to leave a Booking.com review to help warn other people! The room hadn’t been cleaned when we arrived, in fact, there were tangled sheets from the previous guests still on the bed! The whole place was dark and dirty, and the heater leaked gas so we had to turn it off or risk death. I’m not usually in the mood for breakfast most mornings, but the breakfast this place had was a few tiny (bite-sized) pieces of burnt (literally!) toast. Yuck! Well, you get what you pay for…
After we put our stuff away, Colin and I decided to go to the oldest part of Buenos Aires city known as San Telmo in order to take a tour of a group of old ruins called El Zanjon. These ruins had been preserved and transformed into a corporate party venue by the current owner of the property. In addition to El Zanjon, we were going to take a look at Casa Minima – the narrowest house in BA! It wasn’t too easy to find, but we finally arrived at the entrance and were ushered in by an elderly woman who was to be our tour guide. She quickly secured the door behind us – this wasn’t the safest of areas!
First, our guide showed us pictures of the first settlement of Buenos Aires. It is not always realized that BA was originally founded in 1536 because so much of the architecture left in the city dates later than that time. While a beautiful and dramatic corporate venue on the surface, El Zanjon is also one of the most important archeological sites of the city.
While its not so apparent now, we could see on back in the colonial days one of the old city maps that the area of Buenos Aires that is now Puerto Madero is actually built on all reclaimed land. Previously, the port of Buenos Aires was extremely shallow due to the build-up of silt running down the Rio de la Plata from Brazil to Buenos Aires. This silt, due to agricultural activity in Brazil, was also the reason we saw brown streaks in the water coming down Iguassu Falls. The port was so shallow that rowboats had to come out into the water in order to pick up goods and passengers, rowing them back to the shore. An entire workforce was put to task simply because of poor environment.
Our guide explained that San Telmo was originally home to the wealthiest porteños, because of its proximity to the ocean; one could see the ships coming and going from a high room in their house which was perfect for wealthy trade merchants. In the 1830’s El Zanjon was built and owned by one of these rich trade merchant families. The house had been designed to be reminiscent of Pompeii, with numerous arches and a central Roman courtyard. We could see how grand it must have been by the foundations and remnants of the walls and flooring preserved from the old house.
However, in 1871 there was a horrible outbreak of yellow fever in Buenos Aires which had been brought back to BA from Paraguay by Argentine soldiers. When the outbreak started in San Telmo, it was ignored by city officials preoccupied with carnival and naïve to the damage caused by not containing or stopping the spread of yellow fever. This outbreak ended up killing 8% of the population, causing hospitals to be overcrowded and the port and borders of BA closed. Not wanting to be stricken with yellow fever in San Telmo, the wealthy residents fled the area, including the residents formerly occupying El Zanjon. Fleeing residents along with deaths led to a drop in the population of the city by two-thirds. The reason the yellow fever epidemic spread so quickly was due to pollution of ground water by human and factory waste, poor sanitary conditions, and overcrowding. There were also trash-filled ditches filled with disease running through the city. The lack of a proper sewage or drainage system created conditions which led to the death of many people.
Here is a good description of the conditions in Buenos Aires at the time (1871) from the Wiki:
“Hygiene was very precarious and there were many focuses of infection, such as the slums which lacked basic hygiene standards and were crammed with poor black or European immigrants, and the creeks, south of the city limits, which had become a sink for sewage and waste dumped by salting and slaughterhouses along their coasts. As it had no sewerage system, human waste collected in cesspools, which contaminated the ground water and hence the wells, one of the two major sources of the vital element for the majority of the populace. The other source was the Río de la Plata, from which they extracted water by carts, with no process of sanitization…. filth and waste were used for leveling the terrain and streets in a city growing rapidly, mainly due to the influx of migrants. The streets were very narrow and there were no avenues…there were few plazas and almost no vegetation.” (Yellow Fever in BA Wiki)
The main source of water in the city were two creeks from the Rio de la Plata, which originated in Brazil at Iguassu Falls. Our guide took us to see the underground tunnels, or former sewer system that used to cover one of the two creeks. In order to combat this disease the community decided to dry out everything, in the process redirecting the sewage and disease-filled creeks underground. Thus in 1890, the sewers of Buenos Aires were created and designed by an English engineer in order to take the disease-filled water away from the surface of the city. In the meantime, the abandoned houses such as El Zanjon fell into disrepair and eventually were converted into a tenement house. The tour guide showed us where the housing divisions used to be in the building, along with the communal kitchen, water wells, and washing areas that existed when the building was a tenement house.
After the tunnels, our guide passed us on to another guide, a young guy who worked as the designer of the museum, and we went to see a narrow house across the street only 2.5 meters wide built in 1807 called Casa Minima. Colin and I didn’t realize which house we were supposed to be paying attention to at first, because the narrow brick and white adobe house looked quite simple compared to the more elaborate house on its side. However, we soon heard an interesting urban legend behind the small house. Back in the time of slavery in Buenos Aires, it was common for slave-owning families to ‘slice’ off a piece of their house to give to their slaves once the slaves earned their freedom, a token gesture which kept the slave close so the family secrets they learned while working for the family wouldn’t be blabbed all over town. That is what supposedly happened with Casa Minima. Casa Minima is a ‘slice’ off of a larger house next to it, which we walked through along with Casa Minima.
We walked over to the larger house first, which had a center courtyard and a side entrance for a horse and carriage. As we walked around the house, we saw remnants of its history with the numerous different leftover paint shades on the walls and additions from when the space was used as a grocery store and as a tango club. The house was built in brick, as were most important buildings in colonial times, but over the years cement had to be injected between the bricks to keep the structure stable. Some of the bricks we saw looked light gray in color, and we learned that these bricks (which weren’t baked) were taken from constructions from the 1700’s to cut material costs when the house was being constructed. Now the construction looks pretty stable, and tango shows are put on in the middle of the former courtyard.
Done with the larger house, we walked back to the narrow Casa Minima to explore the small house. Our guide explained that, as with El Zanjon, during the yellow fever outbreak in 1871 Casa Minima was converted into a tenement house. However, Casa Minima ended up being used as a residence until the 1970’s. We walked through the archway on the original tile floor to check out a small kitchen, then up the stairs to a small bedroom which would have had a great view of the river before the land reclamation of Puerto Madero; it is likely before the house was divided that this space served as the watchtower for ships for the merchants who lived in the house prior to the yellow fever outbreak.
After finishing our tour of Casa Minima and El Zanjon, Colin and I were both really hungry. Right next to El Zanjon we found a pizza joint called Sr. Telmo which had a free delicious olive oil, cheese, and herb flatbread appetizer for us (we wondered if it WAS the pizza we ordered at first, it looked so good!) and an even more amazing half four cheese, half mushroom and ham pizza. Perfect way to finish our time on Defensa!
That evening we had enough time to rest up before heading out to a music/theater show I’d found called Club Silencio. While I was reading through things to do in Buenos Aires on TripAdvisor a couple weeks before, I had come across a listing for something called “Club Silencio.” Thinking at first it might be a fairly average dance club, I didn’t click on the link at first. Something kept nagging at me though, and I eventually went back and clicked on it. There were almost no reviews on TripAdvisor, which confused me even more. I tried googling the name – again, hardly anything but a few vague articles. I was really starting to wonder at this point – what exactly WAS Club Silencio?! I emailed their website http://clubsilencio.com.ar/ and told them I was interested, and wanted to know more. I didn’t get much in the way of a reply, but was told the time to be at the venue. Once I agreed to purchase 2 tickets, I was given the address. I still didn’t know what we were going to… but I’m so glad we went!
Spoiler alert! If you are in BA and want to go to the show, book it and don’t read any further! 
Here is the description I found of the experience from Club Silencio’s website, poorly translated by Google Translate:
“Club Silencio is a performance blindfolded. The experience of sensations arouses the imagination. A dream with eyes covered, walking through different corners of the mind, the senses through songs and sensations that will go introspectively intermingling of personal emotions with each viewer. Upon awakening, the visuals intensifies.” (http://clubsilencio.com.ar/)
Sounds strange? We thought so too. The performance didn’t begin until 11:30 pm that evening, and we were pretty tired when we got on the bus and headed to the address we were given. We ended up standing outside of what looked like someone’s house/large apartment space with a bunch of other (mostly young) people. It was freezing cold outside, and we were glad once the door finally opened and we were allowed to make our way down a long hall to another door, this one ‘guarded’ by a masked girl holding a lit candle and whispering ‘Silencio.’ Hmm…
Once we got through this door we saw another masked woman and a masked man. We paid for our tickets and we were were each given a blindfold to put on. Unable to see anything, a masked man or a masked woman took us one at a time into a another room; we ‘danced’ into the room with our mystery partner we couldn’t see. Colin and I were then seated together on a couch, although we didn’t know this at first because of the blindfolds.
This hour long show was fantastic – so much fun. We couldn’t see anything through the whole show but our other senses were well tested. Music was being preformed live through the whole experience, different sound effects telling a kind-of story along with the music were used right next to us in a real surround-sound style show. We were given things to hold and touch – I realized after the show I had been holding on to a plush Snoopy toy the whole time which I imagined was a baby doll while the show was going on. There were even delicious smells of all kinds pumped in front of us and even a delicious taste as we were given a chocolate candy at one point to eat! Even though the show took away our sense of sight temporarily, it did a great job in helping us explore the other senses! Finally at the end of the show our blindfolds came off and we could see the room, the singer had his mask off and so did the two girls who came around with glasses of champagne for all of us. We sipped our champagne while we were played more live music and had a slideshow of beautiful images of nature and people from all around the world.
We could even stay on after the show to listen to more live music sung by Shoni Shed (the masked singer) and order more drinks if we wanted. A really different ‘Club’ experience for sure! It was quite late, so we decided to not stay long and took the bus to get back to our hostel. The next day we were getting up early, and we didn’t want to be too tired! You can check out some of the style of music we heard below:
The following morning, July 27th, we had to get up early to head to the Casa Rosada again- this time for a tour of the inside. I had read that the lines can be quite long, and this tour is only open as a first-come, first-served deal. By the time we got there the line was long, but despite this we still ended up on the first tour group of the day. There were only a couple of English speakers in the group, so the guide spoke in Spanish first, then translated for us into English.
We started our tour by visiting a blue room filled with paintings by famous Argentinean painters. A lot of these paintings had beautiful landscapes of different parts of the country, or other rural scenes. In addition, one of the halls we next crossed into had a huge cartoon-like painting by Argentinean painter Ricardo Carpani. One of the rooms we visited was the room where the current President of Argentina, Cristina Kirchner gives her speeches, called the Hall of Women. As we looked around the room, we could see that there were many different pictures of prominent Argentina women. The guide told us that the photo of Evita Peron next to the speech platform is not a coincidence. Cristina very much desires to have the Argentinean people view her as a modern-day Evita… although all the locals we have talked seem to believe she is failing miserably. Nevertheless in the Casa Rosada, the spirit of Evita is still so strong that one of her dresses stands on display in the grand dining hall we walked through.
The highlight of our tour inside the Casa Rosada was visiting and standing out on the famous balcony where Evita addressed the crowds from. During her husband’s presidency from 1946 to 1955, Eva would stand out on the balcony rallying support for her and her husband from the descamisados, or shirtless ones, who made up a large part of their combined popular support; this is also the balcony Madonna filmed on for the movie Evita about Peron’s life and sang the famous musical number “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina.”
Once we finished the Casa Rosada, we went a bit further back in time and paid a visit to the Cabildo up the road snapping some photos on the walk there, and stopping for lunch and a quick blue market transaction...
The Cabildo (from ‘Capitulum, meaning ‘at the head’) is a building built in Buenos Aires in the late 1500’s which acted as the colonial Spanish government town house in past times, but today the building is used as a museum. In fact, a city wasn’t actually considered a “city” by law unless it had a cabildo. There wasn’t much in the way of signs so I can’t relay too much information here except that the building used to act as an old “town hall” of sorts. The Buenos Aires cabildo distinguished itself from other cabildos because of its famous Cabildos Abiertos or open town hall meetings where discussions went beyond their legal capacity, opening laws an ideas for debate and philosophical free thought. It was actually decided at one of these town hall meetings, which took place on May 25th, 1810, that Argentina would establish the Primera Junta or their first government independent from Spain. It was free to go inside, so we wandered around and looked at some of the old flags, clothes, books, paintings, etc. from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries that were on display.
One of the areas of BA Colin and I hadn’t explored yet was Puerto Madero so we headed there after our visit to the Cabildo. As I mentioned when discussing El Zanjon, the city of Buenos Aires has a silt problem with their port, and thus shallow waters which don’t support big cargo ships well. In 1882, the government hired businessman Eduardo Madero to redesign/reconstruct the port area. Puerto Madero, named after the businessman, is built on land reclaimed from the ocean. Unfortunately, by the time Madero and his British engineer Sir John Hawkshaw finished the project, even larger cargo ships started coming to Buenos Aires. The port was too small to handle these big, new ships and another port had to be built. (Incredible waste of time and money, huh?) This new port, known as “Puerto Nuevo” was designed by the Argentine engineer Luis Huergo and is the one still in operation today.
Now, Puerto Madero is a wealthy area which reminded me a lot of Canary Wharf in London, with businesses, banks, ritzy chain restaurants, upscale hotels. But none of those is what we were looking for that afternoon. We were trying to find a large art gallery. Not realizing there was a bridge on the other side of the Casa Rosada, we ended up taking the long way around. We had already walked around a lot that day and our feet were falling off… there were numerous stops on the long walk there to rest!
The art gallery we finally found was called the Fortabat Art Collection. This gallery was pretty large with over 6,000 square meters of space for the various exhibits on display. One of the interesting features of the building were these mobile aluminum awnings that open and close with the sun's position to let light from the sun and night stars inside.
Our last stop of the day was back at the Carlos Gardel museum, located in Gardel’s old house in Abasto. I had heard about free tango lessons the museum offered and thought this would be a good chance to check out some tango! Unfortunately the teachers only spoke Spanish, so Colin and I watched the dancers for a while (also, it didn’t exactly look like a beginners course either!) and then decided to just have a look at the museum and learn a bit more about the man behind tango.
While many think of tango strictly as a dance, it is the tango music which actually started it all. Carlos Gardel was a tango singer known as the ‘king of tango’ due to his massive influence on the genre. His single mother moved him from France to Buenos Aires when he was just 2 years old in order to escape prejudice for having a child out of wedlock. Mother and son lived in a house in Abasto, the very home the museum is now in. Gardel created numerous records which sold tens of thousands of copies and went on tour all over the world – his beautiful voice and good looks helping his success. Gardel even hid the fact that he had a girlfriend (Isabel del Valle) for ten years to help himself seem available to women buying his records more for his looks than love of tango music. At the height of his career in 1935 while on tour, Gardel was in a F-31 plane readying for takeoff in Bogota, Columbia. The F-31 holding Gardel and his musicians started taxiing down the runway, unaware that a second plane had advanced onto the runway without proper authorization from the signalman. The F-31 had advanced 250 meters in full acceleration when it saw the other plane on the runway. Unfortunately, the F-31 was unable to gain enough height and the two planes collided. Gardel died in the crash, yet with that death he cemented his reputation as a tragic legend as often happens when death strikes at the height of fame.
The 28th of July was a Sunday and every Sunday in San Telmo is a fair that can’t be missed! The San Telmo area, where the yellow fever broke out all those years ago, has really cleaned up and is now a funky area filled with great art shops and on Sundays with lots of stalls selling items made in Argentina. Unlike many other markets, there is a requirement on the San Telmo market that the products sold must be crafted in Argentina… no ‘made in China’ here, supposedly. Colin and I had a blast walking around the massive market, as well as the famous Plaza Dorrego Antique and Crafts Fair within the market. I took photos of the most original things we saw for sale at the market:
In a close contest for the coolest thing for sale at the San Telmo Sunday market were these super tiny statues – art figures of different famous characters from movies and comics. There was a little magnifying glass on the table we had to use to see what they looked like. We wondered what they could be made of and learned after asking that they were formerly matchsticks, carved, painted, and whittled down to tiny art forms. Amazing! The girl carving these must have incredibly steady hands…
While on the way to our walking tour we spotted a massive crowd celebrating something – tons of food, music, and dancing. We would later learn it was Peruvians celebrating Peruvian Independence Day! But we had no time to stop then, we’d be late for our tour!
A few subway journeys later we were standing in front of the Recoleta Cemetery. Because it was Sunday there was the ‘hippie fair’ going on which meant PLENTY more stalls and goods for sale!
We enjoyed some doughnuts before spotting two guides from Buena Onda Free Tours, the only independent free walking tour group (the government gives free tours in English as well Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11:00 am) which actually goes inside Recoleta Cemetery. They only run their tours on the weekends though, so get in there quick! There were only a few people so our two guides split us up into an English-speaking group and a Spanish-speaking group. We began by looking at the Nuestra Señora del Pilar church, next door to the Recoleta Cemetery, which was constructed in the early 1700’s.
Inside the church we saw an elaborate display of Baroque art displaying Franciscan saints. The ornate alter was decorated in lots of silver with designs from the Incans in Alto Peru (an area which is now Bolivia.) If you look closely in the photo below, you can also see a body (skeleton) in each case either side of the image of Mary. Yes, those are real skeletons (or ‘relics’ as they are deemed by the church.)
We walked through the neo-classical gates of the Recoleta Cemetery and were greeted by 4 blocks of massive mausoleums, nearly 4,700 above ground vaults, each one holding a family – usually an important family socially or politically. The period between 1880 and 1930 saw Argentina has one of the richest countries in the world, and many wealthy people jumped on the trend of building elaborate and ornamental resting places for their deceased family members. The bigger, the more you loved your family! These mausoleums are private property, and the government charges a maintenance fee to take care of each individual site. Some of the ‘creepiness’ factor in the cemetery came from seeing so many of the mausoleums in ruins or totally trashed because the maintenance fee hasn’t been paid. One of them even had the coffin open and the bones of the person hanging out the side… you’d think the government could at least put that guy back in his box!
The mausoleums in Recoleta are so huge that many of them include staircases, leading to numerous shelves each with its own coffin. Many of the mausoleums are marble and some have sculptures by famous artists inside them. Due to their extravagance, these mausoleums aren’t cheap; owning one would cost you between $30,000 and $100,000 USD… people can buy and sell them like real estate! (But obviously, not the bodies inside. If you sell your family’s mausoleum, you have to move all your deceased relatives’ bodies to another cemetery.)
Quite a few of the mausoleums we saw belonged to famous figures in Argentina’s history. One of these was the mausoleums of Julio Argentino Roca, a former army general who became President in 1880 and again in 1898, serving a total of 12 years as President of Argentina. Before he was President, Roca served as Minister of War. During this time he organized and executed a takeover into Patagonia known as the ‘Conquest of the Desert’ which resulted in mass genocide of the native Indian community through murder of 1,300 Indians and enslavement of 15,000 Indians who were prevented from having children. Roca’s presidency included moves to break aspects of the government away from Church control. He nationalized primary education and the keeping of birth, death, and marriage records, and he is remembered on Argentina’s 100 peso bill – for now. It is planned that by 2015, the 100 peso bill featuring the controversial President Roca will be replaced by new 100 peso bills featuring Evita. For now these new bills are rare and going for $30 USD on Ebay. (100 pesos exchanges at $18 USD on the current official rate, $11 USD on the current blue rate.) And we have one of them!
Most people come to Recoleta and head straight for Evita’s grave, but while it does hold the woman so prominent in Argentina, there actually isn’t too much to see besides the many flowers left behind for her. Evita’s body is buried in her family’s mausoleum under her maiden name Duarte. The story of Evita’s body is an intense one filled with numerous legends and tall tails – and plenty of misinformation. I heard many different versions on the numerous walking tours I went on, documentaries I've watched, and articles I’ve read online. This is the most accurate version of the story from what I can gather:
Evita’s health started declining very early in 1950, when she was just 30 years old. She began fainting, and after evaluation it was realized that she was suffering from advanced cervical cancer. This was the same disease her husband Juan Peron’s first wife died from, but Evita never knew what was wrong with her as her husband concealed her diagnosis. She suffered massively for the next couple of years, going through a hysterectomy and chemotherapy treatment, until her death at 33 years old in 1952. Interestingly, at the time Evita died the public believed she was just 30 because she had used her political position to change her birth records in order to appear younger and born to married parents.
The reaction to Evita’s death was one of great sadness and mourning throughout Argentina – all activity stopped for days. Her body was followed by millions of people throwing flowers during her funeral, and was put on public display for several days before her body was taken to the Ministry of Labor building. Her body was embalmed and a grand memorial was planned to display her body. However, three years after Evita’s death, her body disappeared for the first time.
It was later understood that Evita’s body ended up being stolen in 1955 by a military coup that overthrew President Juan Peron. Her body was then stored all over the city – in the waterworks, in vans, in different political and military buildings. But because her body was the symbol of the Peron political power, the anti-Peronist military believed it had to be removed from Buenos Aires completely and (with the help of the Vatican) sent her to be buried in a secret grave in Milan, Italy in 1957, under the name Maria Maggi.
Eventually, in 1971, Evita’s body would be returned to Juan Peron’s home in Spain where he lived with his third wife Isabel. Many strange stories are told about this period, that the body was kept on their dining room table and that Isabel had an obsession with Evita, washing her and brushing her hair every night. The truth is not quite that creepy. Evita’s body was kept on a marble table near the dining room table, not on it, and Isabel helped restore Evita’s body, not obsess over it, (But who really knows but her, right?) as the body was quite damaged, including missing a finger.
Here is what Carlos Spadone, a businessman present when Evita’s body was delivered to Peron had to say about its condition:
"General Peron, the gardener and I took the body out of the coffin. We lay it on a marble-topped table. Our hands got dirty from all the earth, so the body had to be cleaned…Isabel took care of that very carefully with a cotton cloth and water. She combed the hair, and cleaned it bit by bit, and then blow-dried it. It took several days… there was a large dent in the nose, and there were blows to the face and chest, and marks on the back… there had also been a serious blow to one knee; but I don't think she had been strung up or whipped, as some people say - I don't believe that.” (Carlos Spadone)
What Spadone and the Perons discovered was too much for Isabel to restore alone. Government favor turned positive for Juan Peron again and he became President of Argentina for the third time in 1973. After his death in 1974, Isabel had Evita’s body brought to Argentina and restored by artist Domingo Tellechea for public display, planning again to create a memorial for her. However, Isabel was overthrown by a new military dictatorship which buried Evita’s body in 1976 in Recoleta Cemetery.
Once we were done with the cemetery, Colin and I took a glance around the hippie fair and bought some sausage sandwiches to snack on since we hadn’t had much to eat that day. We managed to get back to the hostel for our bags (which we had left in the locker) and then to our next couchsurfing friends Jorge And Elena’s apartment. Once we got there and settled in they cooked us dinner and we had a wine and a good chat!
The morning of July 29th we had planned to do a walking tour but missed it and had to reschedule. Instead, we headed into Florida to change some money again, paying a visit to a few different things before our afternoon tour of what we call the “Dante Building.” Our first stop was the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Cathedral, which looked like it was closed at first because of the “under construction” screen on the exterior. We learned the afternoon before that this 16th century Neoclassical cathedral was where General San Martin was buried (we had just seen his wife’s tomb in Recoleta) and decided to pay him a visit!
Because we didn’t really have anything else to do, Colin and I next decided to see the Manzana de la Luces or the “Square of Enlightenment” which housed numerous buildings from the 1600’s including the San Ignacio Church, the San Ignacio High School, numerous rental houses, and the Hall of Representatives which was an amphitheater in French restoration design where historical shows of Buenos Aires history are put on. (In Spanish only.) The main thing of note here are the underground tunnels which were originally excavated by the Jesuits. These tunnels formed a network that connected the churches, public buildings, hospitals, and the Fort and was used both for defense and smuggling. We couldn’t see them however – the sporadic tour times are not so friendly!
Colin found a museum for us to visit next called the Buenos Aires City Museum – but it might as well have been called the children’s or toy museum! Most of the stuff on display was old children’s toys and the only copy of an amazing bassinet! Another part of the Buenos Aires City Museum, the Star Pharmacy, was nearby so we thought we’d have a look at that after the toys. Take a look at our photos!
After a quick peak at the Franciscan Church across the road, Colin and I continued to the historic Star Pharmacy or “La Estrella,” the first pharmacy in Buenos Aires created by the government in 1830 and still styled with the paintings and furniture from that era. Coolest pharmacy I’ve ever been in, that’s for sure.
Soon it was time for Colin and I to head back towards the center for our 4:00 pm guided tour of the “Dante Building,” better known as Palacio Barolo. We saw this building on our previous walking tour, but now we were getting the chance to see the Dante-inspired work on the inside. I’ll tell you now what we learned from Jonathan on our walking tour, plus what we learned by roaming around inside the Palacio itself. Jonathan asked us if we thought the building resembled any other building we had previously seen – we couldn’t think of any. Actually, we had previously seen the identical building in Montevideo, it was Palacio Salvo! It’s such a great building it had to be produced twice…
Italians Mario Palanti and Luis Barolo designed and built Palacio Barolo in the early 1900’s specifically with Dante Alighieri and his famous work the Divine Comedy in mind. Here are the interesting statistics that have a connection with the Divine Comedy: Palacio Barolo has 22 floors in 3 sections – hell, purgatory, and heaven, which is the same number of chapters in the Divine Comedy. The palace’s 100 meter height is one meter for each canto or division of the Divine Comedy. And the lighthouse at the top represents heaven and the light it produces was meant to reach its matching twin in Montevideo (it doesn’t – no one took into account the curvature of the Earth).
We explored each of the floors, taking tons of photos and getting some great views of Buenos Aires. We even got to take an exhausting walk up a spiral staircase and sit in “heaven” or the lighthouse at the very top!
By the time we were finished with that walk, we were ready to collapse… but we were going out that evening to a special dinner! Stay turned to find out more…
Francesca
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